Terminal sliding mode control for rigid robots (Q1129656)

A terminal sliding mode control for \(n\)-link rigid robotic manipulators is proposed. The controller design uses a control law based on some properties of the manipulator with a nonlinear term of the sliding variable vector. The uncertainty bound needed to derive this control law depends only on the inertia parameters of the robot, which can be estimated off-line or on-line. In addition to the convergence to zero (in finite time) of the sliding variable, the tracking error in the terminal sliding mode also converges to zero in finite time. The performance of the proposed controller is shown by including some experimental results.